Such pure dance geometry might have been the cue for a first proper essay in twelve-note serialism; but in fact the models were not quite as constructivist as that description might suggest. At some stage of their discussions, Balanchine had brought up his old idea of a competition before the aging gods, with its series of historic dances exploding—as Kirstein had put it—into the twentieth century.29 Stravinsky still had the copy of De Lauze’s Apologie de la danse that Kirstein had sent him, and they probably mapped out the work in terms of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century dances represented there. The music examples included a sarabande, a gaillarde, and several versions of the French popular dance known as the branle, or bransle: the “bransle simple,” or single bransle, the quick “bransle gai,” and the oddly named “bransle à mener ou de Poitou,” a kind of early minuet with three-bar phrases; and there was a picture of two trumpeters playing a bransle. In Stravinsky’s scheme, the first part of the ballet would be a “Pas de Quatre” based on the trumpet fanfare he had composed the previous December, and followed by a “Double” and “Triple Pas de Quatre,” for eight and twelve dancers respectively—titles that pun on the old musical sense of “double” as a “variation” (like the ones in Handel’s “Harmonious Blacksmith”). The long second part would be a sarabande and gaillarde, in the form of a pas de trois, followed by a string of different types of branle (also pas de trois), and ending with a “Pas de Deux,” just at the point where that episode usually figures in Romantic ballets. This would then run into the final part, a more up-to-date set of duos and trios, cast as a quick-moving sequence of angular modern dances culminating in a return to the opening fanfares.
Whether or not Stravinsky planned Agon quite so explicitly that summer of 1954 (and he certainly did know more or less how long it would be30), there is no mistaking the resemblance of this musical dramaturgy to the scheme outlined by Kirstein the year before. Balanchine, it is true, had long since abandoned—if he had ever entertained—any idea of Handelian gods surrounded by baroque statues and an ornate proscenium. He would be content with dancers in rehearsal tights on a bare stage. But Stravinsky was obviously intrigued by the musical concept of antique dances in a hypermodern setting—a neoclassicism that would transform the modelling process as well as the model. He duly marked up his De Lauze and, while there are no clear quotations, the sense of allusion—rhythmic as well as melodic—remains extremely strong. We may be a long way from the Pulcinellification of Mersenne, but not so far that the outline of a phrase or the turn of a rhythm cannot sometimes, here and there, be recognized.
For a while the music came quite rapidly, and by the day of the Monday Evenings’ Dylan Thomas tribute, the 20th of September, the first part was virtually complete, despite the distraction of a three-day trip to Las Vegas toward the end of August, for some reason, with his doctor, Max Edel. Closeted in his studio at one end of the house, he was nevertheless surrounded by at least the spiritual echoes of musics remote from one another in time. Craft was not only rehearsing the program for the Thomas concert, which included madrigals by his latest hero, the Neapolitan mannerist Gesualdo, Schütz’s “Fili mi, Absalon” and various other Baroque pieces, as well as the In Memoriam Dylan Thomas (for which Stravinsky himself coached the tenor, Richard Robinson), but he was also preparing more Webern, which he had persuaded Columbia’s director of repertoire, David Oppenheim, to let him record in September with some of the artists who were also involved in the memorial concert. Rehearsals took place, sometimes during the day, in the sitting room at North Wetherly Drive, like some daily domestic reenactment of Balanchine’s vision of the passage of centuries.31 When they started recording, Stravinsky—as he had done in February—sat in on the sessions.
Oppenheim had already agreed a recording session for the new Stravinsky piece, together with the Shakespeare songs, and was even willing to let Craft conduct these works, on the principle, as he told Stravinsky, that “in this series we are making absolutely authentic performances under the supervision of yourself.” “Perhaps,” he added, with a shrewd eye to the seventy-two-year-old composer’s future, “we should continue that way.”32 Hitherto, Stravinsky had not automatically seen Craft in quite this kind of role, though he certainly had confidence in him as a conductor of his music. At the Evenings the young man was rapidly establishing himself as an efficient and well-organized conductor of obscure or difficult modern music like Webern and Schoenberg, and equally of the kind of early music that lay outside the usual orbit of small choirs or baroque orchestras. He had prepared the Shakespeare songs in the composer’s absence, had conducted the West Coast premiere of the Septet, and was now being entrusted with the In Memoriam. It was true that his manner at rehearsal was apt to be abrasive, and not all the players liked him. But somehow his enthusiasm and musicality overrode such difficulties, and on the occasions when they did not, he was protected by the feeling that Stravinsky’s support for the concerts would not be jeopardized by the dissatisfaction of a few replaceable individuals.33
The concert on the 20th of September 1954 marked a watershed in this and other ways. It was Craft’s first major Stravinsky premiere, and—taken as a whole, with its Gesualdo and other Renaissance and Baroque items—it was a statement about the historical context within which Stravinsky wished his music to be understood. Perhaps this connection did not strike the majority of the audience, to whom his new “atonal” manner was still too strange for its antique connotations to stand out. Those closer to the composer, like Huxley, who sat with him as usual in the front row and stepped up to give a short talk about Dylan Thomas as a lyric poet, may have seen Craft’s presence on the podium as a kind of focus of the new direction. There may even have been some—acute, or merely cynical—who realized the extent to which the program was a survey of Craft’s own past and future influence on the composer. The purest form so far of Stravinskian serialism rubbed shoulders with solemn, lapidary motets and ricercars from the late Renaissance, and weirdly dissonant Gesualdo madrigals that Craft and Morton had themselves extracted from manuscripts in the Library of Congress.34 Of course, Stravinsky’s interest in old music long predated his association with Craft, but the intensity of the latter’s enthusiasm and its practical outcome in concerts that Stravinsky attended meant that its sound was suddenly a presence in his creative ear in a way that it had seldom been before.
The concert was also a pointer toward a new and somewhat altered Evenings regime. Peter Yates had withdrawn at the end of the previous season, and had insisted on taking the old Roof title with him. As director of the Monday Evening Concerts, Morton was projecting a more solidly structured, less bohemian, more professional type of season, with fewer concerts but a less hand-to-mouth, less “underground” mentality. Craft would play a bigger part in the program planning, and he would conduct something like half of the concerts. The memorial itself was quite a grand affair. The County Auditorium was packed and the atmosphere emotional. A recording was played of Dylan himself reading three of his poems including “Do not go gentle,” and the In Memoriam setting, with its Dirge-Canon frame, was performed twice.35
Partly as a result of this concert and the planning that had gone into it, Morton himself became more intimate with the Stravinsky household. They had first met in 1941, but had only become friends in 1953 when Craft (who knew Morton through his association with Yates) brought him to Wetherly Drive to discuss the possibility of altering the anti-Semitic passages in the Cantata for a performance at a Roof concert the following March.36 Morton, himself a Jew, was a music critic and musicologist, but he must quickly have overcome Stravinsky’s prejudices as to the musicality of those trades, since he was soon being asked for his advice, or at least his ear, on artistic matters. A day or two after finishing his setting of the Thomas poem, Stravinsky had played it through as usual to Craft;37 but by the time he had composed the Dirge-Canons a week later, Craft was in New York, and it was Morton who was summoned to act as captive audience. Stravinsky, he found,
/> played it at the piano, very badly, and he sang the tenor part himself, in a composer’s voice. This was not a performance, but it was accompanied by a running verbal analysis of the serial structure. […] At one point in the preluding dirge-canons, he paused to say in a conspiratorial whisper, “Here I cheated the row—I did not like the harmony.”
After handing out whisky, Stravinsky added that
it was still difficult to “unlearn” tonality and that he still felt the pull towards a tonal center. […] “But I do resist the academic approach, except that I find it very interesting to ‘experience’ […] the serial method in my Dylan Thomas piece, so long as the harmony is correct. I must have the correct harmony!”38
IT REMAINED Stravinsky’s intention to finish Agon before starting on the Venice commission, if it came through, or something else if it did not. He had promised Kirstein as much in August, and when Paul Sacher had written a fortnight earlier offering a new Basle commission, he had not even troubled to respond.39 As for Piovesan, he was still battling with the labyrinthine Italian bureaucracy to find the money to pay Stravinsky’s advance. Having heard about the St. Mark Passion, he implored Stravinsky not to abandon the idea, which he considered a huge attraction for recalcitrant Venetian committees.40 At this point, the end of November, the composer was not even thinking about Venice. Agon was now complete to the end of the “Gaillarde” in the middle of the second part, a piece so exquisitely intricate and individual in its conception that one can scarcely imagine its being written in any state other than complete mental absorption. Basing himself very loosely on the Mersenne gaillarde in De Lauze, Stravinsky weaves a surreal musical tapestry from behind which the dance is no more than faintly heard, like costumed figures glimpsed through a series of colored gauzes lit at an angle. Everything about the music is improbable, from the idea of setting the actual gaillarde tune as a strict canon between harp and mandolin (the two most disembodied yet least cerebral instruments in Stravinsky’s orchestra), to the eccentric notion of turning the string section upside down, with a pair of double basses at the top and a viola-cello quartet groaning away underneath in thick C major harmonies of a kind that would probably have sent his old teacher, Vasily Kalafati, into a rage of offended propriety. Like much of Agon, the “Gaillarde” is music that studies every known procedure in a mirror, inverting everything, offering us a world we can “see” but not enter, understand but not inhabit. The most astonishing thing about it is that once we have seen it we can neither forget it nor deny it. Like every work of imaginative genius, it changes our minds and perceptions forever.
On the day Stravinsky finished the “Gaillarde,” the 29th of November, Bonnie Murray sang the new version of the Balmont songs at an Evenings concert, conducted by Ingolf Dahl, and the twenty-year-old Marilyn Horne, a member of the vocal ensemble for Craft’s Gesualdo recording, gave the U.S. premiere of the three little “Souvenir de mon enfance” songs (likewise in their orchestral version).41 Whether or not Stravinsky attended is uncertain, but if he did, he must have been as conscious as anyone in the audience of the remoteness of these songs from the music he was writing at that moment. He was drafting a short pas de trois by way of coda to the “Gaillarde,” but this time, instead of taking a model from Mersenne, he was sketching a miniature violin concerto in the style of Berg. Early in November he had written to the head of Boosey’s German office in Bonn, Edgar Bielefeldt, asking him to send a copy of the orchestral score of Berg’s concerto;42 and presumably it was sent, since the violin figuration in the Coda, with its strings of bravura sixths, bears an obvious family resemblance to the smooth thirds and sixths that, in Berg’s case, reflect the conscious quasi-tonal design of the series. Stravinsky’s piece, too, is serial, though the violin writing does not depend on that fact. The series is even a twelve-note one, the first example in any work by Stravinsky, although the point is largely symbolic as there is no proper dodecaphonic (twelve-tone) working, only a succession of brisk play-throughs, in a rhythmic style that again, somewhat oddly, recalls the Berg.
On 4 December, the day before he drafted the first part of the Coda, he had written to Piovesan what amounts to a protocol of an agreement to compose the St. Mark Passion that the Biennale director so earnestly desired. His wording, though, was ambiguous. “Agree, then, from this moment” it ran, “that it is this ‘Passion’ which should form the object of your negotiations [that is, with Piovesan’s Venetian backers], and of our possible contract.”43 In other words, call it a Passion for the sake of diplomacy, but it might well not be one in the end. No less significantly, the letter makes no mention of the work’s duration, though Piovesan had specified “thirty to forty minutes” in his commission. Whether it was this letter, or something to do with the novelty of the pas de trois Coda, that led him to write to Kirstein ten days later suggesting a meeting in New York the following month in order to “discuss some important technical problems in connection with my Agon,” is a matter for conjecture, but it seems likely that he had already decided to request a postponement of the ballet.44 In the intervening days he had been away in San Francisco, conducting Petrushka with the touring London Festival Ballet, and he had had time to reflect on the relative possibilities of the two commissions. Piovesan wanted his choral work, which Stravinsky still probably intended to last at least half an hour, for the 1956 Biennale. Agon was scheduled for earlier in 1956. But Stravinsky may have reasoned that, since the ballet commission was in the bag and he had actually received all of the fee, it would be more politic to guarantee the Venice work for that year (to help Piovesan raise the money) and put Agon off until 1957. He could, of course, present the issue of twelve-note technique as a pretext—a “technical problem”—and perhaps even not a wholly imaginary one, since a serial ballet was undeniably a riskier, more speculative venture than was a serial choral work (assuming it was going to be one), which would have the whole long history of medieval, Renaissance, and late Baroque polyphony, to say nothing of Pythagorean and Boethian number theory and Schoenberg’s own late choral works, as spiritual precedent. In any case, it seems clear that, by the time he and Vera climbed onto the plane for Portland, Oregon, at the start of a short concert tour that would touch on New York before returning them home via Atlanta at the start of February, he had firmly made up his mind to shelve the ballet in favor of the Passion, or cantata, or whatever it might turn out to be. The agreement he reached with Kirstein and Balanchine, when they lunched together in Manhattan on 24 January, was little more than a formality.
The Passion idea was certainly genuine. In New York, the day after the Kirstein lunch, he discussed the project with Auden, who suggested some possible text sources but did not conceal his dismay on learning that Stravinsky had thought of using the Picander libretto, which was all that survived of the St. Mark Passion of Bach.45 The trouble was that they would not be back at North Wetherly Drive until 5 February, and they would be off again on a two-month European tour a month later. In the absence of a firm Venetian contract, and knowing the perils of Italian bureaucracy, it was hard for Stravinsky to start work with any conviction on a new commission at such a moment, and impossible to carry on with the old one. For several weeks he was in a creative limbo. When Charles Munch wrote from Boston inviting him to compose a short piece for Monteux’s eightieth-birthday concert in April, he expressed ritualistic doubts as to whether he would have the time, but in fact soon produced a convulsive one-minute orchestral canon on “Happy birthday to you”—the piece that had surprised and irritated him at his Aspen rehearsal five years before—and offered it to Munch under the gently ironic title Greeting Prelude.46 That month Craft was again rehearsing and recording Webern, and Stravinsky’s birthday piece is a more or less open skit on Webern’s prismatic arrangement of Bach’s six-part Ricercar in the Musical Offering, except that, like most of Stravinsky’s Webernisms, it has an energy and physicality lacking in the model.
They set off once more for the East Coast on 5 March 1955, going first by
train to Pittsburgh, where Stravinsky had a pair of concerts, before flying on to New York on the 13th. It had not been a productive month, but it had been a tragic one. Within hours of each other in mid-February, Eugene Berman’s film-star wife, Ona Munson, committed suicide and Maria Huxley died of the cancer that had wracked her for the past three years. The Stravinskys had to comfort both husbands, but Huxley, who dined with them two days after Maria’s funeral, was the more difficult subject, since he was, it seemed, no more capable of facing the reality of his wife’s death than he had for a long time been of accepting the likelihood of her dying. At the dinner her name was not so much as mentioned, and almost a fortnight later, when Isherwood came to supper with his young partner, Don Bachardy, Stravinsky told them that Huxley had still not referred to Maria’s death in his presence.47 By contrast Gerald Heard, whose Sunday-morning sermons in the Ivar Street Buddhist Temple they all continued to frequent, appalled the Stravinskys with his unconcealed glee at her demise. “How much happier she will be,” he had chortled less than a week before she died, “out of the body.”48
With a nice sense of symmetry, they returned to Europe through Lisbon, then hired a car and drove across southern Spain to Madrid, where Stravinsky conducted a concert, visited the Escorial, and called on the philosopher Ortega y Gasset.49 From Madrid they flew to Rome, where the composer promptly took to his bed with flu and missed the opening of Vera’s first ever one-woman show of her paintings at the Obelisco Gallery at the end of March. He recovered in time to conduct a radio concert in the Foro Italico a week later, but was then assailed by diverticulitis, spent two days in the hospital, and emerged only just in time to attend the special vernissage that Vera had laid on for his benefit. It was thirty years almost to the day since Katya had been hospitalized in the Eternal City with the pleurisy that heralded the final onset of her long-drawn-out terminal illness.
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